Internews Center for Innovation & Learning

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Our information ecosystems research is taking flight in exciting directions, both internally and externally. Within Internews, the Center is contributing to the research design for information ecosystem assessments in additional countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Mobile phones and digital tools are offering incredible opportunity for developing countries to enter and shape digital economies. But how can we keep technology and development players from becoming extractive industries, so that people’s data becomes the new oil of the 21st century?

As media and technology are rapidly changing the quantity and quality of the information circulated in our daily lives, we all know intuitively that our practices and standards for dealing with these shifts has not caught up.

When Kuang Chen was conducting research in East Africa, he noticed that there was a strong appetite for data both from local organizations and donors. Yet, most data was trapped in paper files stuck in storerooms, with manual data entry as the only solution to releasing it. Wondering how the latest data technologies could be leveraged for the lowest resource organizations, Kuang created the software called “Shredder” that eventually became Captricity.

This question occupied minds of 15 Ivano-Frankivsk (Western Ukraine) activists, who took part in the 2-day workshop on April 3-4th. The training is part of the Initiative “Open Budget” implemented by UNDP and Internews in Ukraine. The participants were of different backgrounds, i.e. public activists, journalists, CSO workers and employees of state financial department.

The Media Map Project began as a multifaceted two-year research collaboration between Internews and The World Bank Institute, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The pilot phase took place between 2010 and early 2012.